News Articles

Genome rearrangements, resulting in variations in the numbers of copies of genes, occur when the cellular process that copies DNA during cell division stalls and then switches to a different genetic “template,” said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in a report that appears today in the journal Cell.
The new mechanism is called replication. “Fork Stalling and Template Switching,” said Dr. James R. Lupski, Cullen professor of molecular and human genetics and vice chair of the department at BCM. It not only represents a new way in which the genome generates DNA copy number variation, but it also demonstrates that copy number variation can occur at a different time point in the life of a cell. DNA replication takes place as the cell is dividing and becoming two.

Laser surgery to correct vision problems has been in use since the early 1990s. Photorefractive Keratotomy (PRK) is typically used to correct low to moderate myopia, while laser in-situ keratomileusis (LASIK) is preferred for high myopia corrections. Although over 18 million LASIK procedures have been performed worldwide, there is still some controversy regarding the maximum correction possible and efficacy with this technique.
In an article published in the January 2008 issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology, researchers from Miguel Hernandez University, Medical School, Alicante, Spain; and Ankara University School of Medicine, Ankara, Turkey; report on a study of high myopia patients ten years after LASIK surgery.

The loss of deep-sea species poses a severe threat to the future of the oceans, suggests a new report in Current Biology. In a global-scale study, the researchers found some of the first evidence that the health of the deep sea, as measured by the rate of critical ecosystem processes, increases exponentially with the diversity of species living there.
“For the first time, we have demonstrated that deep-sea ecosystem functioning is closely dependent upon the number of species inhabiting the ocean floor,” said Roberto Danovaro of the Polytechnic University of Marche, in Italy. “This shows that we need to preserve biodiversity, and especially deep-sea biodiversity, because otherwise the negative consequences could be unprecedented.

A team of biologists have developed a model mapping the control circuit governing a whole free living organism. This is an important milestone for the new field of systems biology and will allow the researchers to model how the organism adapts over time in response to its environment.
This study marks the first time researchers have accurately predicted a cell’s dynamics at the genome scale (for most of the thousands of components in the cell). The findings, which are based on a study of Halobacterium salinarum, a free-living microbe that lives in hyper-extreme environments, appear in the latest issue of the journal Cell.
The researchers focused on a little studied organism that can survive high salt, radiation, and other stresses that would be deadly to most other organisms.

Over the course of the 20th Century, doctors waged war against infectious bacterial illness with the best new weapon they had: antibiotics.
But the emergence of dangerous, multi-drug resistant strains of tuberculosis and other killer infections means that in the 21st century antibiotics are losing ground against bacterial disease.
Now, researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City say exciting new molecular targets -- so-called "virulence factors" that bacteria use to thrive once they are in the host -- present an alternative, potent means of stopping TB, leprosy and other bacterial illness.

When it comes to choosing a place to live, male chimpanzees in the wild don’t stray far from home, according to a new report in the Dec. 27th Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. The researchers found that adult male chimps out on their own tend to follow in their mother’s footsteps, spending their days in the same familiar haunts where they grew up. Male chimpanzees are generally very social, but how they use space when they are alone might be critical to their survival, the researchers said.
“We have found that, like females, male chimpanzees have distinct core areas in which they forage alone and to which they show levels of site fidelity equal to those of females,” said Anne Pusey of the University of Minnesota.

Many studies have been published that link specific “biomarkers” − genes, mRNA or proteins − with an aspect of cancer development or treatment, and the results often appear to be statistically valid, said the lead author of an article in Nature Reviews Cancer. Robert Clarke, Ph.D., D.Sc., is professor of oncology and physiology & biophysics at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center at GUMC, where he co-directs the Breast Cancer Program.
“But it is not clear that that solution is complete or is necessarily correct. It may be partly right and may be intuitively pleasing because you are getting what you expected to see from an experiment.

The annual America’s Most Literate Cities ranking, published today in “USA Today,” measures the cultural resources for reading in America’s largest cities. It names Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Paul, Denver, Washington, DC, St. Louis, San Francisco, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Boston as the most literate US cities, in that order.
The survey ranks cities (population of 250,000 and above) based on 6 key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and internet resources.
This is the fifth year the study has been conducted, and its author, Central Connecticut State University President Dr.

'Flag waving' is often considered a metaphor for stirring up the public towards adopting a more nationalistic, generally hard-line stance.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, close to one-third of the population in the United States is obese and another third is overweight.
Excessive weight gain is elicited by alterations in energy balance, the finely modulated equilibrium between caloric intake and expenditure. But what are the factors that determine how much food is consumed?
Part of the mystery is unfolding in the laboratory of Maribel Rios, PhD, at the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. Through their work, Rios and colleagues have demonstrated for the first time that a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is critical in mediating satiety in adult mice.

University of California, San Diego researchers have proven in animal studies that fibrosis in the liver can be not only stopped, but reversed. Their discovery, published in PLoS Online, opens the door to treating and curing conditions that lead to excessive tissue scarring such as viral hepatitis, fatty liver disease, cirrhosis, pulmonary fibrosis, scleroderma and burns.
Six years ago, the UC San Diego School of Medicine research team discovered the cause of the excess fibrous tissue growth that leads to liver fibrosis and cirrhosis, and developed a way to block excess scar tissue in mice.

People with high triglycerides and another type of cholesterol tested but not usually evaluated as part of a person’s risk assessment have an increased risk of a certain type of stroke, according to research published in the December 26 issue of Neurology®.
“LDL or ‘bad’ cholesterol has been the primary target for reducing the risk of stroke, but these results show that other types of cholesterol may be more strongly linked with stroke risk,” said study author Bruce Ovbiagele, MD, of UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA, and member of the American Academy of Neurology.